Iqra’i

Will pointed me towards this ridiculous article in the Washington Post. It starts out well: mocking Maha is always appropriate.

She’s the pouty protagonist in the melodrama that runs throughout “Al-Kitaab,” the standard beginning text in Arabic classes at Harvard and other American universities.

We are taught to speak our first Arabic sentences by expressing Maha’s incurable angst. We learn in Chapter 1 that Maha is desperately lonely. In later chapters, we are told that she hates New York, has no boyfriend and resents her mother.

I tried to find a clip from the Al-Kitaab DVDs, but for some unknown reason no one thought they were interesting enough to put on YouTube. Instead, I present you with a claymation re-enactment of her cousin Khalid’s greatest hits.

Pollak concludes that “[l]earning Arabic should not include lessons in political propaganda.” (Propaganda, apparently, being teenage ennui and sad Palestinians.) All I can say is that if Pollak thinks this is propaganda, he’s clearly never encountered Thrasymachus.

Published in 1965 for boys at English public schools, Thrasymachus combines the best of Greek grammar with the remnants of British imperialism. The story itself deals with a painfully stupid child who descends to the underworld, where he encounters — and offends — various heroes of Greek myth. (The episode where he hits on Briseis in front of Achilles is particularly choice.)

It’s in the prose composition exercises that the ideology really comes out. (Prose comp, for those fortunate enough to escape its horrors, involves translating English passages into Latin or Greek. Theoretically this is to practice tenses and particles, but really it is a particularly fiendish bit of torture invented by Classics teachers who think there should be more pain, and that irregular verbs are insufficient for that purpose.)

The prose composition passage for Chapter 29, for instance, reads:

“If I give you this sword, my son, will you promise to fight bravely when you become a man?” “Yes, father. If the enemy attack the city, I shall never betray you but I will fight until they are all driven out.” “If our king leads us against the enemy’s city, you must follow him and never run away.” “But, father, mother has told me never to leave home. If I leave her, she will grieve.” “If she said that, she was foolish. You must always obey the king if ever he orders you to fight for your native land.”

It strikes me that if you get to college, decide to study Arabic, and don’t already know mainstream Arab opinion on Israel, or who Nasser was, your textbook is as good a place as any to learn it. Al-Kitaab has plenty of problems pedagogically, but by presenting famous Arabs from Nasser to Ibn Batutta, it never claims to be making an ideological statement.

Pollak’s objection isn’t really that the book is political — he wants it to be political, in the direction of his own beliefs. He’s welcome to write his own book. If it has better DVDs, I’ll buy it.

Parenthetically, I present my favorite prose comp passage:

In a certain house, which has only one bath, live two young men, Xanthias and Orestes by name. Xanthias likes the bath, but Orestes is already washing in it. Xanthias says savagely to Orestes, “Get out of that bath, young man.” Orestes, however, who is an insolent fellow and does not like Xanthias, does nothing but wash himself. Xanthias therefore seizes an axe with which he cuts off Orestes’ head. Thus Orestes dies and Xanthias washes himself in the bath. Phew! What young men!